


The Crash

by siren_call



Category: Fallen Hero Series - Malin Rydén
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/F, Face-Sitting, Fallen Hero: Retribution Spoilers, Feelings, Hair-pulling, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Oral Sex, Reckless Driving, an argument at the start because there's a lot of feelings, excessive use of innuendo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:07:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22763716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/siren_call/pseuds/siren_call
Summary: Is she something else you will have to survive?Will you want to?
Relationships: Julia Ortega/Sidestep, Ortega/Sidestep (Fallen Hero)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 83





	The Crash

**Author's Note:**

> I think eight years of foreplay is enough, don't you? :^)

The black Ducati roars underneath you as you fly down the wet midnight highway. The streetlights reflected into the obsidian void of the asphalt, their colours bleeding into each other. Lighting strikes a skyscraper and it illuminates the entirety of Los Diablos in a moment of pure white, frozen in time. You take a corner too fast for the storm and the bike almost slides out from beneath you and into the concrete barrier. You straighten up in time but it feels like your stomach was left strewn across the road behind you.

You don't slow down.

The bike becomes silent, kickstand down, in the alley beside Julia's apartment and you still don't slow down. You rip the helmet off, curly hair sticking to the sides of your face as it collects the rain. You shake it out, harshly. The door almost hits the wall as you march into the building and if it wasn’t for the doorman recognising you from earlier visits with Charge you would’ve been stopped on entry.

Well, they would have tried.

The elevator closes and you witness yourself in the mirrored doors. Ink black riding leathers glossy, eyes wild. Hair still askew from the helmet and now the rain, you run your fingers through it roughly, try and sort the mess out but you don't succeed.

Standing in front of Julia's door your heart is beating like you ran those flights instead of just taking the elevator. You're still dripping wet when she opens the door, wearing sweatpants and an old t-shirt, her hair unruly like she had been asleep.

She is the most beautiful person you have ever seen.

"Mona?"

"Hey Jules," you exhale, "can I come in?"

"Of course," she's already moving aside to let you in, rubbing the corner of her eye.

As Julia engages the locks on her front door you stand rigid in the middle of her open plan living area, grip a vice on the chin of the helmet.

“It’s late, what's up?” the question is soft, she looks so soft like this.

"I-" _love you_ , and you choke on it, your other hand a fist now too.

Julia waits patiently but you can tell she’s becoming worried, the look is so familiar on her face these days.

Past the heart in your throat you say, "You are the best thing that ever happened to me," you can tell your intensity takes her by surprise, "I need you to know that.” You need that to be enough for her to understand, but it's not.

"Ramona you're scaring me," Julia is now wide awake.

"I'm scared too," because it’s a harmless truth that you can give her.

"Talk to me," and she moves away from the front door, "you said you had enemies, is it-"

You take a step back and she stops, pained.

You drop the helmet onto the couch, gloves follow pulled off carelessly with your teeth. With abrupt movements you unzip the moto jacket and you drop it. It hits the floor like a dead body.

"Mona you're trembling."

"I-" its coarse, and you swallow twice and try again. "I need-"

"Tell me," she pleads, large dark eyes begging, "whatever you need you will have it, we'll work it out, just talk to me, _please_."

You need her to know, that's why you’re here. She deserves to know what's hiding underneath the face of her old friend. Her-

You can't keep hanging in this free fall, waiting.

You can't keep being loved and knowing it's a lie.

You grab the sleeve of your black undershirt, the fabric shaking in your grip and you let out a sob. Julia moves towards you in the periphery of your blurred vision and you realise you have started to cry.

" _Wait_."

Julia stops and stares at you, as if you were a car crash. As if you actually spun out on the highway twenty minutes ago.

You set your jaw, gather all of your gallows daring and rip the band-aid off. You almost rip the stitching.

You lay your whole forearm bare before her, up to your elbow. Orange truth exposed. The hot skin of your arm feels cold in the open air and you can't look her in the eye. You brace for it.

For the shot, the impact, the asphalt.

When there is nothing but silence you glance up.

Julia looks at the tattoos like she doesn't believe what she sees, then she looks at you like she's seeing you for the first time.

"Cuckoo." She says and you've hit the ground.

This is what you wanted, needed. Did you expect this fall to end any other way?

_What have you done?_

You almost throw up on her penthouse oak floor. But you choke it down. Force the sleeve down too and grab your jacket in one fist and the helmet with the gloves inside with the other and almost run to the front door.

Julia does. Her back hits the door, arms out to stop you and you go cold all over.

You force yourself to look her in the eye but you’re unable to say her name to tell her to move out of the way of your escape.

Feelings are tripping over themselves to get across her face. Panic, shock, understanding.

"This is what you tried to show me, eight years ago." It's not a question. "Three weeks before Heartbreak." When you tried to unbutton your shirt to show her the barcode, the truth, and you couldn’t. At the time you knew she thought your shaking fingers were for a different reason.

"Let me go," and it's strangled.

"No."

"Ortega."

" _Never again_ ," she says with blinding conviction, and something snaps within you, something deep.

"Don't you get it? I’m not a person, I'm a _thing_ , Julia! I’m escaped government property, an affront, I’m a Frankenstein's monster and you can’t fucking love a lab grown slab of _meat_.” The last words spat, vicious. You're heading for the concrete barrier and you can't find the brake. Gesturing to the distance between you two you cry, "Whatever we had was never _real!_ "

Julia is angry now, no sparks on her fingertips like there would've been eight years ago but you find them in her eyes. "How dare-" she starts again, "How _dare_ you try to tell me my grief wasn’t _real!_ That my mourning was a lie!” And you have never seen her like this.

"I will tell you what’s real! The way I almost destroyed myself after you died. The way everything is right when you’re around. The way having you alive again feels like everything I have lost come home to me. What is real is that I have loved you, you stupid stubborn moron for eight goddamn years. And I know it's real because there was never anyone after you then, just like there will never be another after you now." She's shaking with fury.

“I'm _not_ _real,"_ you repeat, full of something that you cannot name. "I was created as a lie, to be a lie. I will always be this. I was fooling myself to think I could be anything else, fooling you. _Ramona_ was just a song in the top 40.”

"Do you think I care?” arms thrown out, “I knew I loved you before I saw your face, knew your name. This name you chose for yourself? So what! Just like all your other choices, sidestep, the people you saved, the way you cared about us, your fire, your fucking jokes. That's why I fell for you. It wasn't what you looked like or where you came from. That never mattered to me, like it doesn’t matter now. I was yours then and I am yours now. Do you think this kind of love can be _faked?_ ”

"You just didn’t get a good enough look." The helmet is loud when it hits the floor. Julia becomes uncharacteristically silent. Hands moving quick to mask the shaking as you tear off your undershirt to uncover the undeniable truth written in parallel lines in the centre of your chest. Arms spread out, palms upwards like you are ready for the handcuffs. Like you are expecting to be strapped to a cross, a table.

Her gaze darts all over your half naked torso, for the first time. What you're sure will be the last.

It stops on the upper end of your left forearm and she stills. She's looking at the scars, where you had tried to carve off the evidence of your inhumanity.

You remember being surprised when you bled so much red and not even one drop of orange.

Julia reaches a hand out towards you and you flinch. She slows down her movements but she still comes closer until her fingers hover over the shaking skin of your arm, you feel the radiating warmth of her. You realise she’s waiting for permission. The longing to feel her touch is almost overwhelming, but maybe this is what it'll take for her to accept it, you lift your arm up to her.

When Julia’s fingertips brush against the goosebump skin of your inner arm, it feels like she’s shocked you. Her hand burns a path as it follows the lines up your arm to your barcode. She’s standing so close now.

She gently runs her fingertips back and forth over the barcode. No, not the barcode. The gruesome scars from another time you tried to carve yourself into something else, _someone_ else.

"I'm not real," you say gently into the quiet. 

Julia just looks devastated. She places her whole palm over your heart, and it’s going to crash through your ribcage when she says, voice steadfast, "This is real."

Your mouth wobbles.

Her other hand comes up as well and together they cradle your face, thumbs wiping away tear marks. "This is real," she says, unyielding. Sky is blue.

You inhale a wrecked sob.

Julia holds your face tenderly, like she has held your heart all these years.

_How can she stand it?_

She looks at you, at you entirely. Your eyes, the tattoos, your mouth.

"This is real," she tells you, before annihilating the space between your lips and you collide.

You weren’t prepared for this. You weren't prepared for her _hands_. Like she is trying to touch every inch of you she can now that she can, without the barrier of your clothes, without restraint.

Between her mouth and her embrace you are _wanted_ and you're already so overwhelmed, moaning into the kiss. Julia just swallows it. Stomachs it.

She walks you back, you thikn you hear her accidentally kick your helmet. She presses you into the wall of the entryway then presses the line of her body into yours harder still. Like she can't get close enough. Then she kisses down and down your neck until you know she has reached the tattoos, but she doesn't stop. Leaving wet open mouthed kisses down your chest. She traces her thumbs along the line of your underwire, grabs you through the lace, pulls it aside to-

Your head hits the wall with a loud thud, and you let out a groan as she gently puts her teeth on you, flicks her tongue and circles.

You hold the back of her head and she hums against you. Everywhere she touches feels like a hot brand on your touch-starved skin, feels hot enough to burn away the orange.

She unclasps your bra, pulls it off you and it’s dropped forgotten. She begins to track her mouth along a line to your other breast, until your barcode. You look down and she’s already watching you through her lashes as she places a deliberate open mouth kiss over the perpendicular orange lines and _fuck_.

You pull her up by her hair and crush her mouth to yours. She moans, loudly, hand on the wall beside your head.

You can’t get her shirt off fast enough and-

She's not wearing a bra and all your breath leaves you.

 _Why would she wear one in her home?_ Your last, helpful braincell supplies.

You've never seen her up this close before. Gorgeous brown skin over strong chest, toned torso. The rhythmic circuitry of her mods uninterrupted, worth more than a fighter jet. Skin a mosaic of scars, some small and some deadly, all proof of what went up against Julia Ortega and lost. You lick your lips, eyes travelling further up her body until the scar on her lip that you put there, and-

It’s pulled into a wide smug grin.

And it feels almost like Heartbreak never happened, smiling at you like you just told a dirty joke instead of shedding a decade long secret. And you are so, so in love with her. Something in your gut ignites, lighting up your face with a grin too and you lick a long hot stripe from the top of her breast to her collarbone, and you begin kissing every bit of neck you can.

"Don't stop," she moans, so you don’t. You could listen to her like this for the rest of your life. You kiss from her throat south to her chest and take one nipple into your mouth and rub your thumb in circles around the other.

Her hand slides down the wall to grab purchase on the entryway table, she knocks something over but you couldn't care less. She doesn't even glance to see what it was as you switch your mouth to the other.

She ends up moving out from under your mouth to hoist you up by your riding leather covered thighs and drives you into the wall. Legs locked around her hips and you roll them half out of your mind.

" _Julia._ "

"Tell me what you need _cariño_ ," hot in your ear, vibrations sending goosebumps down your whole body to your clit.

The choked noise you make was supposed to be words but you can't remember them. You're insatiable now, you've gotten a taste of her skin on yours. You want all of her, wanted it all yesterday. Wanted it eight years ago.

_You really get to have this?_

"It really doesn't bother you?" You hear yourself ask, even as you're grinding against her because you really are a moron. 

Julia laughs, lowly, "If you are asking me that I'm not saying it right."

She carries you down the hall then and kicks the bedroom door open. She doesn't even turn on the lightswitch, using the light from the hallway to guide her and drop you onto what you're sure is a California King bed.

"Which is unusual as I am pretty good with my mouth." Julia's grin is absolutely _predatory_ , canine digging into her full bottom lip. The counter doesn't come because your stomach has dropped all seven floors to ground.

“Then put it to good use,” you say hoarse.

She doesn’t move and neither does the grin. Instead, “Oh, I intend to,” she hooks her thumbs into the waistband of her sweatpants and makes a show of it. Like she's going to strip for you which would be sexy as hell if you had any fucking patience.

You sit up and move to the edge of the bed to start leaving open-mouthed kisses down her torso and hook your fingers into the hem. You look up to see her watching through hooded eyes, lets you take point. You pull her pants down and she's not wearing anything under these either.

You’re floored enough that when she places a hand in the centre of your chest and pushes you to lean back you give her no resistance. She steps out of her pants and puts a knee between your thighs. "Let me," she purrs, tracing an orange line down your chest, “Tell you _repeatedly_ ," tracing her index finger along the hem of your pants. Your stomach trembles, the bedspread bunching underneath your grip. “How much I enjoy every,” your pant button pops open under her hand, “single inch and scar...”

She lowers herself down towards you, giving you the kind of view that makes your mind exit stage left. She runs her tongue up an orange tattoo south of your belly button, “and _line_ of you.”

When she helps you take off your pants there is nothing left in the way.

You are laid out, laid low before her. Exposed. Vulnerable. There is so much orange.

The bedspread becomes taut as you grip tighter, Julia sees and understands, hands calming on you as she guides you backwards up the bed. She settles a thigh between your legs, covering most of your body, runs a hand from your knee up your outer thigh. She stops to dig her thumb in and you realise it's the Psycopathor scar. She pulls back to look at it, run a finger over it's length and when she kisses you again it's harder. Her hand travels to the soft inner flesh of your thigh then and up, up until her fingers slip easily between the welcoming heat of your folds.

You break the kiss to gasp in a hiccupping breath, and she makes soothing noises in your ear. When she arrives at your clit your nails are digging into her back and her bicep and you’re trembling all over. She leans up on an elbow to watch you writhing underneath her hand and you’d feel embarrassed if it didn’t feel this fucking good.

She swallows a few more of your sounds before she attaches her lips to a nipple and ultimately between her talented fingers and her talented tongue you don’t last. Your eyes roll back, you’re gasping your release with your mouth open and you’re arching underneath her.

She pulls back to watch you come apart. Clutching at her like a lifeline as you roll your hips into her hand. Moans ripped from somewhere animal. Raw desire in her gaze as you look up at her, shaking through it. You have to grab her hand to still it, you're oversensitive and whimpering.

When you come back to yourself Julia’s mouth is on your neck and she's grinding herself onto your thigh.

"That was your hand not your mouth," you can't resist panting. Hands running up the warm expanse of her back.

You feel the grin on your throat before you see it on her gorgeous face and she says, “I’m not done,” with the grin that always means trouble.

You are proven right when that grin moves down the length of your body.

“Would you like to know,” hungry look a bold contrast to the soft caress of her hands as they run up and down your thighs, your abdomen, sometimes following scars sometimes following lines, “how much I have thought about every single way I want to take you apart?”

Your lips are parted but nothing comes out of your mouth. She looks so pleased with herself, her hand is orbiting back to your centre. She lets your legs wobble open and closed under her touch, gentle and coaxing, until you’re no longer too sensitive.

She settles into you, thighs either side of her head, and with the first sweep of her tongue you bolt upright. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” She laughs, hooks her hands behind your knees and pulls you to the edge of the bed where she kneels on the ground before you, between your legs.

You’re on display, spread out at her pleasure, nowhere for you to brace your legs in the open air so they hook over shoulder and dangle off the bed. She dives back in. Hands coming up from around your thighs to stroke the skin of your jumping stomach.

You card a hand through her hair, not sure if the soothing gesture is for her benefit or yours. “So this is how I get you to shut up,” the joke an attempt to right your inertia.

Julia does something with her tongue and hums what you’re _dead sure_ is a _‘ha ha’_ and you fold over.

Then she moves backwards, bringing you with her until you leave the bed, slow enough that you see it coming, until she’s lying on her rug and you’re sitting on her face.

“ _Fuck._ ”

Julia doesn’t stop, she just wiggles her eyebrows at you.

You move to get off her, worried you’ll suffocate her but she holds you to her, her breath huffing out of her nose against you. She weaves her fingers with yours, to stabilise you, but when she does that thing with her tongue again you fold over her.

She takes this change of angle as an opportunity to bring up a hand behind you to use in tandem with her mouth and you curl over further.

Until Julia’s hand hits you on your ass and you moan and it takes you an embarrassingly long time to realise its a tap and not a spank and you bolt upright. Almost off her if it wasn't for her grip. She just takes in a deep breath when you're upright, your face cherry red but she just looks _thrilled_.

“Sorry,” she says, beaming up at you, “I need to breathe.” You stare at her in exasperation, she just laughs, breath ghosting over you.

“Lean back, querido,” hands guiding you to hold her bent knees behind you. You’re stretched out above her, the hunger in her gaze makes you burn up red all over. You run your fingers through her hair again, this time gripping it harder and her eyelids flutter and Julia-

You have guessed she would possess the talent to back up her cocky confidence but-

_Fuck._

Julia had a right to be smug, you’ll never tell her though, the way you begin losing your self-control and move your centre on her face is confession enough. Until all you can do is ride her face and cry out for her. She moans against you in encouragement. Until your thighs are shaking either side of her head, one hand still on a knee one hand in her hair, back arched and you come undone.

Again.

Julia is relentless and you have to get off her when you begin twitching, she lets you off this time. You collapse on the rug beside her and she rolls over and collects you up in her arms as you zone out staring at the ceiling. Watching her smoke alarm flickers on and off.

"Is that gonna be a problem" you ask, curious.

"Hmm?"

"Smoke alarm."

"Why, are you gonna light up a smoke?" She asks warm palm up and down your back.

"No. I'm just worried about your mods setting something alight"  
  
"Other than your heart?" she shoots back like she can't help herself.

“Just get on the bed,” you reply, deadpan.

“Eager?”

“I’m only thinking of your old bones.”

“ _Hey,_ " and the hand on your back starts tickling you.

“Q _uit it!_ ” wriggling away and standing up.

You look down at her sprawled out and lazy. She looks you in the eyes as she runs a hand down her body.

"Get on the bed, Julia," and this time it's said like a promise. That gets her up.

You push her so she’s the one that falls on the bed this time, but her smirk is still the same. You put your hands all over her, because you need to, because she needs it too. You slip your thigh in between hers and slide it against her.

Looking down at her, pliant, through hooded gaze you murmur, “I’ve thought a lot about what I want to do to you too, Jules,” then you kiss her and while she's distracted you slide a hand up to grip her untamed shoulder length hair and _pull_.

Julia bends underneath you like an offering. The sight hits you in the guts full speed.

You begin at her throat and kiss down the valley between her breasts over her abs. Over the Catastrofiend scar which when you bite she laughs, a weightless sound, her hands in your hair now, as you go further. You make a small detour to the nanovore scars. Place kisses over them softly like you have wanted to for too long.

The way Julia opens her legs without hesitation for you makes you feel intoxicated.

You look up at her and she is watching everything, so you lick along the stretchmarks of her inner thighs, give them the same attention that she gave to your lines. You leave a love bite on the crease of her inner thigh like proof, like a claim, and her inhale becomes a gasp.

You bring up a hand and run your middle finger down the crease of her folds and she’s slick. You hear her inhale a deep, shuddering breath. She has one hand carded through the hair behind your ear and the other bent back to grip the headboard and she's on edge. You guide a thigh over a shoulder to give yourself room.

Your gaze moves back and forth between her face and your hand as you slip your fingers in.

Bringing up your other hand from around her leg you spread her, glancing up at her when the headboard creaks, she’s white-knuckling it. You lock your gaze to hers, flash her your best smile and lick a long stripe. All the way up to her clit and she moans in a way you’ve never heard before.

Under the attention of your tongue she quakes, heel digging into your back. You kiss her open-mouthed and move your tongue in circles, in zig zags, in anyway that pulls a sound from her. You slide two fingers inside and curl them and she is practically singing for you.

Murmuring an endless litany of praise and encouragements and declarations of love, slowly morphing from English to Spanish. You add a third finger.

" _Mierda,_ " she swears and you worry for the headboard.

You don’t slow down.

The mods along her biceps begin to glow and you still don't slow down.

When Julia comes it’s with her hips rising off the bed and you follow. You watch it all. At the way her abs tense, her thighs tremble, her arms shake from their grip on the headboard. You watch enraptured, at the way her face is almost ugly in her ecstasy.

“ _Mona_ ,” and you are so glad you gave yourself a name.

Your eyes are open for all of it, including the way the hallway light flickers. And you ride it out with her, move with her, mouth following her.

She takes everything that you give her, takes every lick of your tongue every pass of your fingers inside her and she doesn’t tell you to stop, so you don’t. But she's trying to brace herself underneath you and you recognise the set of her jaw. You pull off her and swallow before asking. “Do you want me to stop?”

“ _No_.”

But there are tears gathering at the corners of her eyes, the overstimulation must be wrecking her so you pull your fingers out. She lets out a whine. You dry your fingers on the bedspread and rub the back of your hand across your mouth and crawl up her body.

“Sparkles,” you say softy, "we can take a break and go again in a moment.” She’s still breathing hard, still watching you. It feels like she hasn't taken her eyes off you this whole time. Then you understand.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Because it's the truth, because you’ll never leave her now, not unless she tells you to.

Something ricochets across her face and she buries it in your neck. Her arms envelop you in a tight embrace and you hold her as she comes down. You comb your fingers through her hair, shorter now, you wouldn’t be able to plait it into one long braid anymore. You wonder if it feels just as good as she said it used to, you hope so. Then you trace over her back, her mods, their edges. You’ve never had a chance to look at them uninterrupted before. You kiss her temple and rest your lips there.

Eventually she is calm in your arms. You move slightly so you can put a soft kiss on the closest port, on her deltoid.

"How's team morale?" an echo from her Marshal days.

Julia huffs into your neck, "Heavenly," and if it's a little choked you don't say anything about it.

You slide out from under her to hover over her as she lays on her front. The kisses across her back become open mouthed, and you move your hands up and down her sides and Julia hums, content.

You kiss each implanted port along her spine as you travel further down, sliding your body along hers. Until you are placing open mouthed kisses over the meat of her ass and give it a bite.

When you grab her in both hands and spread her she brings a knee out to give you more access, lifting her pelvis off the mattress. But it's not enough. You grab her by the hips then and pull her backwards and up and Julia lifts her head out of the pillow where she buried it. She looks over her shoulder at you, surprised, at you or the pleased noise she let out you're not sure.

She's still not where you want her, which is on all fours, so you grab her by the hair and pull to coax her where you want. The noise Julia makes is guttural.

“This would’ve been easier if you kept the braid,” pulling a fraction tighter and you hope she catches what you can't say. That you’ve been wanting to run your hands down the ports along her spine, that you've wanted to pull her into a perfect bow by her hair for eight years now.

You let go to stroke a splayed hand down her back along the ports and her head falls forward boneless. The first passes of your hand between her legs are just to ease her back into it, but she still pushes back into your touch, like it's already not enough. So you give her what she needs. You are rewarded with her back muscles tensing and releasing and they look so much better out of the suit than you imagined.

You have the best view in Los Diablos.

You decide to change the angle, reaching around and under her, fingers setting a quick pace over her clit, she moves like she can’t be still, pushes her ass into your pelvis. Other desires you've imagined, left to simmer like a sauce on her kitchen stove, come to the surface. But that would mean pausing, and you can't even slow down.

You want to feel her against you, so you run a hand back down the length of her body to grab her by the hair again. Pulling her head back so she is kneeling up against your front, back to chest. She kneels taller than you like this and you move her head to rest onto your shoulder so you can get at her neck, fingers still working her.

Julia's hand is on your thigh and she is raking her rails until she finds the scar again, and you moan into her neck. She uses her other hand to hold your mouth securely in place.

You can tell she's close by the sounds she’s making. By the way you feel the ports along her spine hum against your chest, warm. So with your hand between her legs and the other in her hair and your mouth on her throat you _bite_.

You feel through her whole body when her orgasm hits. The hairs on your arms stand on end. Her palms sending shivers over your scalp, over the scar.

You can see it too, her ports glowing, casting your figures in a soft pale glow that lights up her face in furrowed brow euphoria. She twists her body to kiss you and you taste every noise she makes as it passes between your open lips. You move with her through it and release her hair and gradually slow your hand until she pitches forward, crawling up to lay half on top of her.

Your awareness returns gently, the huff of your breathing, the rain gentler now, the thunder somewhere far off.

"You look like the cat that got the canary," you tell her instead.

"Not the cream?" and she surprises you by seeming to look more smug.

You hope there's enough light coming in from the open door that she can see your unimpressed expression.

"Speaking of which, I've decided that I'm more of a cat person now," she continues, extremely pleased with herself.

"Oh my god shut up," but there's no heat in it, you're all burnt out.

"You could even say," she says slowly, carefully pronouncing every word, "that I've acquired a taste for pu- _mmf_ "

You can't let her finish, so you put a hand over that beautiful grin and try not to grin yourself. You fail that. You can feel her smile grow wider underneath your hand. Her eyes full of happiness and adoration and _love_ -

"You have bad taste," too melancholy to be entirely a joke.

Julia licks your palm. Your eyes narrow but you don't budge. She begins making out with your palm, until your face cracks open in a manic grin and you wipe your spit slick hand all over her face.

" _Sonofa_ -"

You can't hold back the laughter, you straddle her to try and wipe more over her face, the two of you wrestling and laughing like you're both ten years younger, she's laughing now too. You have missed that sound, still miss her now, the feeling set deep in your bones.

You go to lick her face but she intercepts, cuts you off with a kiss.

"Nah," she says smug look still on her face, "you taste fine."

"Put that Cheshire grin away I've seen enough of it," you could never get enough of it.

"Oh? Do you have a suggestion for where I could put it?"

"Fucking insufferable," you reply, full of affection.

The laughter fades eventually and the rain can be heard once again. You're half under the covers now and it's been comfortably silent for a while. You look at your arm, where you lay against her, pale skin and orange tattoos next to her sepia and circuitry. A tangle of lines and scars and opposite colours. Your head rests underneath her chin and you can feel her heartbeat where it lays underneath your hand.

"I didn't know that you lit up." 

"I should've disconnected the system but that takes time and I was busy," you can feel her words as well as hear them.

You try not to think about the implication of her going to bed primed and armed. "Blue really is your colour."

“Stay the night.” you can tell from the way she says it that she doesn't expect you to.

“Okay," you whisper into her skin. She hugs you to her tighter and you don't think you've ever felt as safe as this.

**Author's Note:**

> I made myself really sad thinking about worst-case scenario regene reveals so decided to take matters into my own hands and can I just say, from the bottom of my heart, my bad.
> 
> As always I will love you forever if you leave me feedback, and it can be bad feedback! I'm not gonna know it's bad if no one tells me!
> 
> [Edited dec/20, thank you again for all your lovely comments <3]


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